Related papers: The Thurston norm via Normal Surfaces
Landry, Minsky and Taylor defined the taut polynomial of a veering triangulation. Its specialisations generalise the Teichmuller polynomial of a fibred face of the Thurston norm ball. We prove that the taut polynomial of a veering…
In this sequel to earlier papers by three of the authors, we obtain a new bound on the complexity of a closed 3--manifold, as well as a characterisation of manifolds realising our complexity bounds. As an application, we obtain the first…
The aim of this paper is to discuss some applications of the relation between Seiberg-Witten theory and two natural norms defined on the first cohomology group of a closed 3-manifold N - the Alexander and Thurston norms. We start by giving…
A pseudo-Anosov flow on a hyperbolic 3-manifold dynamically represents a face F of the Thurston norm ball if the cone on F is dual to the cone spanned by homology classes of closed orbits of the flow. Fried showed that for every fibered…
In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these…
This is a survey on the global theory of constant mean curvature surfaces in Riemannian homogeneous 3-manifolds. These ambient 3-manifolds include the eight canonical Thurston 3-dimensional geometries, i.e. R3, H3, S3, H2 \times R, S2…
In this paper we prove two results, one semi-historical and the other new. The semi-historical result, which goes back to Thurston and Riley, is that the geometrization theorem implies that there is an algorithm for the homeomorphism…
We interpret a normal surface in a (singular) three-manifold in terms of the homology of a chain complex. This allows us to study the relation between normal surfaces and their quadrilateral co-ordinates. Specifically, we give a proof of an…
The simplicial volume is a homotopy invariant of oriented closed connected manifolds measuring the efficiency of representing the fundamental class by singular chains with real coefficients. Despite of its topological nature, the simplicial…
Given a nonorientable, locally flatly embedded surface in the $4$-sphere of nonorientable genus $h$, Massey showed that the normal Euler number lies in $\lbrace -2h,-2h+4,\ldots,2h-4,2h \rbrace$. We prove that every such surface with knot…
For a compact, irreducible, $\partial$-irreducible, an-annular bounded 3-manifold $M\ne\mathbb{B}^3$, then any triangulation $\mathcal{T}$ of $M$ can be modified to an ideal triangulation $\mathcal{T}^*$ of $\stackrel{\circ}{M}$. We use the…
This paper contains a generalization of the convex ideal case of the Thurston-Andreev theorem when the genus is greater than 1. The heart of the paper concerns taking formal angle data on a surface and ``conformally flowing'' this formal…
We show that the Thurston seminorms of all finite covers of an aspherical 3-manifold determine whether it is a graph manifold, a mixed 3-manifold or hyperbolic.
We consider the natural problem of counting isotopy classes of essential surfaces in 3-manifolds, focusing on closed essential surfaces in a broad class of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Our main result is that the count of (possibly disconnected)…
In his seminal 1976 paper Bill Thurston observed that a closed leaf S of a foliation has Euler characteristic equal, up to sign, to the Euler class of the foliation evaluated on [S], the homology class represented by S. The main result of…
Let $M$ be a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold with a fibered face $\sigma$ of the unit ball of the Thurston norm on $H_2(M)$. If $M$ satisfies a certain condition related to Agol's veering triangulations, we construct a taut branched surface in…
A triangulation of a surface is irreducible if there is no edge whose contraction produces another triangulation of the surface. In this work we propose an algorithm that constructs the set of irreducible triangulations of any surface with…
For closed oriented manifolds, we establish oriented homotopy invariance of higher signatures that come from the fundamental group of a large class of orientable 3-manifolds, including the ``piecewise geometric'' ones in the sense of…
For a closed orientable connected 3-manifold $M$, its complexity $\boldsymbol{T}(M)$ is defined to be the minimal number of tetrahedra in its triangulations. Under the assumption that $M$ is prime (but not necessarily atoroidal), we…
The class of 2-dimensional non-integrable flat dynamical systems has a rather extensive literature with many deep results, but the methods developed for this type of problems, both the traditional approach via Teichm\"{u}ller geometry and…